The Professoriate's Resistance To Teaching and Service

There is wonderful irony in decrying the state of K-12 education
and then recommending that the university has no stake in trying to
improve it.

A few years ago an "ad hoc" campuswide faculty committee in a large,
prestigious land-grant university in California was appointed to
provide recommendations for reductions and cost savings in the
university's academic programs. Among the introductory remarks
prefacing its various recommendations, the committee proffered the
standard professorial lament regarding the woeful state of preparation
of entering undergraduates and then, practically on the next page,
recommended the "disestablishment" of the university's school of
education and the cessation of the university's involvement in the
preparation of K-12 teachers. Cutting through the verbiage, the
committee's basic rationale was that the university should not be
involved in the training of teachers; that such a function more
properly belonged with other, lesser institutions.

In responding to this recommendation a number of individuals, both
on and off the campus, pointed out the wonderful irony of decrying the
state of K-12 education and then recommending that the university had
no stake in trying to improve it. Others, including influential area
legislators, pointed to the arrogance and ignorance of a recommendation
which, in effect, suggested that a publicly supported land-grant
institution had no responsibility to serve the public. Suffice it to
say, this particular recommendation was decisively discredited and
officially rejected by both faculty and administrative
decisionmakers.

To me, what is most troubling about the
above scenario is the fact that a significant number of faculty members
at this particular land-grant university (and I suspect at many
others), were either ignorant or disdainful of two of the legally
mandated triad of functions traditionally charged to such institutions.
That triad comprises research, community service, and teaching
responsibilities. But, as exemplified by the committee's
recommendation, these functions are certainly not viewed as being
co-equals. Rather, they are seen by many faculty members as existing in
a hierarchical construct with research enjoying the ascendant status of
"end-all, be-all"; teaching a distant second; and community service
something that might be given a fleeting, if somewhat disdainful,
afterthought.

Such a mentality has led to an institutional culture in academe in
which promotion, tenure, status, and influence are impacted most
profoundly by whatever the professoriate deigns to be scholarly
"research" while considerations related to teaching and service lag far
behind. It is no secret that the academic career of an individual with
an excellent record of teaching and/or service, but who is without the
requisite record in research, will be severely stunted. Conversely,
marginal accomplishments in teaching and service will be of little
handicap or concern to the individual who possesses a good research
record.

One could perhaps make the case that research is indeed more
important than either teaching or service if the definition of research
were strictly limited to the creation, discovery, or substantive
extension of significant knowledge. Who can argue against the
incredible importance of ordered study, inquiry, and investigation that
result in new insights, discoveries, and advancements in medicine,
science, and mathematics? There can be no debate that the experimental
researchers who make such contributions deserve support, status, and
reward.

The problem, however, is that the definition of "research" in the
university often has little to do with any of the above. In order to be
able to extend the mantle of "researcher" to the professoriate in the
humanities and other liberal studies that do not lend themselves to
experimental research, its definition has been transmogrified to
include activities such as: preaching (publishing) to an
intradisciplinary choir in an obscure, but "refereed" journal wherein
authors incestuously cite each others' work; re-counting, re-sorting,
and reconfiguring opinions or existing data into a "new" report;
critiquing or "deconstructing" someone else's work into one's own
version for one's own purposes; writing and receiving a "research"
grant no matter how derivative or inconsequential the purposes of the
grant (in fact, merely receiving the grant often qualifies one as a
"worthy researcher" even before any work is done or reviewed).

Certainly, publication, surveys, criticism, and grant-writing are
important and in many cases very scholarly activities, but are they
truly research and, more important, are they more worthy of collegial
and institutional support, status, and reward than excellence in
teaching and important service to the community?

I would predict that if the definition of "researcher" were to be
restricted to the laboratories of the hard sciences and, if,
concomitantly, activities such as journal publication, survey work,
critiquing, and grant-writing were no longer legitimized by being
described as "research," but rather had to find their justification in
contributions to teaching and service, then very quickly the current
hierarchical structure of support, status, and reward favoring research
would be reshaped into a more "flattened" structure wherein the
teaching and service functions of the university would also be
considered worthy scholarly activities.

The late Ernest L. Boyer, in his 1990 book, Scholarship
Reconsidered, argues for a reinvention and reinvigoration of the
professoriate and thereby the university, so that greater value accrues
to society. Mr. Boyer conceptualizes the work of the professoriate "as
having four separate, yet overlapping, functions." These four
functions, he writes, are the following: the scholarship of discovery
(research); the scholarship of integration (making connections across
the disciplines); the scholarship of application (service, applying
knowledge to consequential problems); and the scholarship of teaching
(educating and enticing future scholars).

By elevating teaching and community service to the level now
reserved exclusively for research, the professoriate of our land-grant
universities can show awareness and appreciation of the fact that
levels of support for the university are tied to public and legislative
perceptions of the worth of what the university contributes to society.
If, however, university faculty members cannot bring themselves to make
such changes, then perhaps we can at least hope that they are wise
enough never again to suggest that involvement in crucial public issues
is not an appropriate function of a public university.

Dennis L. Evans is the director of credential programs in the
department of education at the University of California, Irvine.

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